Communications in the 1990s is considerably more complex that it used to be. Back in the stone age, when one Neanderthal wanted to communicate with another Neanderthal, he walked over to the second Neanderthal and grunted a few sounds. Gradually, communication evolved into written messages that could be delivered, first by messenger and later by mail.
Eventually, the telephone was invented. The telephone allowed a person to communicate with another person simply and efficiently by picking up the receiver and dialing the telephone number of the person he wished to speak to.
Salespeople were on a similar evolutionary track. When a salesman wanted to sell something to another person, he went door to door and tried to convince whoever was there that they should buy what the salesman was selling. When this proved to be inefficient due to the high number of doors slammed in the salesman's face, the salesman began mailing letters, brochures, and other written promotional materials to prospective customers. This was also inefficient, since a very high percentage of these mailings were considered to be "junk mail" by the recipients. Only a small percentage of the mailings resulted in sales.
It didn't take long for salespeople to discover the telephone. A salesman could quickly and inexpensively call a prospective customer and explain what he was selling. Since most calls ended quickly (with the potential customer expressing his lack of interest in a variety of ways and then hanging up) the bulk of the time was spent figuring out who was going to be called and trying to establish a connection with that person. The phone would often be busy or not answered, forcing the salesman to try again later and look for another prospective customer to call.
Salespeople began to realize that this approach was also inefficient. They discovered that computers could quickly perform much of the overhead involved with establishing connections with prospective customers. When a salesperson (now known as a "telemarketer") completed a call, he could instruct the computer to dial the next number from a list of numbers stored in the computer. This became known as outbound telemarketing.
Although very efficient, conventional outbound telemarketing still had problems. Much of the telemarketer's time was spent listening to busy signals or phones that weren't answered. In addition, telemarketers often grew weary of a high degree of rejection, and were reluctant to instruct the computer that they were ready to make another call. To solve these problems, predictive dialing was developed. In a typical predictive dialing arrangement, the potential customer is called by the computer. If someone answers the phone, the computer finds an available telemarketer and connects the call to this telemarketer.
While prior attempts in the predictive dialing field have been very good at the "dialing" part of predictive dialing, they have not been good at the "predicting" part. Often, the computer makes and completes a call to a customer, only to discover that there isn't an operator available to take the call. This is known as a "nuisance call". The customer then is subjected to a recorded announcement, a ringing signal, dead silence or a hang up. The opposite problem of having operators sitting idle waiting for the computer to dial a customer also frequently occurs in prior attempts. This is known as "operator idle time".
U.S. Pat. No. 4,829,563 to Crockett et al attempted to solve these problems of nuisance calls and operator idle time by dynamically adjusting the number of calls dialed based on short term comparisons of the weighted predicted number of calls versus the predicted number of operators, and based on periodic adjustment of a weighting factor. Crockett's "short term" comparisons are always "reactive" in nature--changes are made only after nuisance calls or operator idle time rise to unacceptable levels. Therefore, Crockett's "reactive dialing" approach falls short of solving the above-identified problems of nuisance calls and operator idle time.